Top headlines at the Drudge Report, as of 6:30 a.m. ET today:
What does all this mean? At least two conclusions seem obvious:
- Democrat primary voters are crazy;
and - People don’t like Hillary Clinton very much.
Say what you will about Barack Obama, but you cannot deny the man has a certain charisma about him. Ever since JFK was assassinated, Democrats had been looking for a candidate like Obama, a charismatic figure as a vehicle to advance a liberal policy agenda. Bill Clinton’s presidency was marked by asterisks — he never got a majority of the popular vote — but Obama won by decisive majorities in 2008 and 2012.
For better or worse, therefore, the Democrats are now Obama’s party, and the fracture in this year’s primary campaign is the result. Bernie Sanders is Obama without charisma. Hillary Clinton is who she has always been, and she has never had any charisma. What the Democrats are betting, really, is that they won’t need charisma in November. Their ideal scenario would be for the Democrats to nominate Hillary, Jeb Bush to get the Republican nomination and Donald Trump to run a third-party populist campaign, so that the Clintons can slither back into the White House on a 43-percent plurality the way Bill did it in 1992.
The underlying problem for Democrats is that their desperation to capture and hold the White House has cost them scores of seats in Congress and state legislatures, and the number of Democrats among governors have been decimated. Democrats now represent the Left on a nationwide basis, which means they represent New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle and other major urban centers. Democrats represent government employees, including employees of the liberal-controlled public school system, and Democrats also represent recipients of government benefits, including college students dependent on financial aid.
Democrats are generally the party of all who live at taxpayers’ expense. Democrats are hostile to the interests of those who work for a living in the private sector. Democrats hate America, because Democrats hate capitalism, hate the traditional family, and also hate God. Democrats are the party of abortion clinics and unwed motherhood. Democrats are the party of Hollywood, the New York Times, and the feminist blogosphere. Democrats are the party of dopeheads and atheists, vegetarians and pacifists, homosexuals and hedonists. Democrats are the party of blue-haired hipsters and tattoo-covered slackers. Democrats are the party of the emotionally wounded and the mentally ill, the party of “victims.”
Having collected all these disparate anti-American interest groups into a nationwide anti-American coalition — a phenomenon that was apparent as early as the 1972 McGovern campaign, and replicated in the 1988 Dukakis campaign — the Democrats were able to win the White House in 2008 and 2012 without making any real concession to the part of the American electorate that is Christian, patriotic, and happily married.
Elections have consequences, and living in the Obama Age means that we no longer live in America. We now live in Anti-America.
Obama promised that America would be fundamentally transformed and he has accomplished what he promised, which is why Bernie Sanders was able to rally the Kook Coalition to beat Clinton in the New Hampshire primary by a 22-point margin. As crazy as Hillary Clinton is, she isn’t quite crazy enough to represent what the Democrat Party has become in the Obama Age. Insanity is now public policy, and the paranoid rage of maniacs is a political force to be reckoned with in the wake of our fundamental transformation. The crisis of the Hillary Clinton campaign is therefore an omen of America’s impending doom because, even if the Democrats lose the next election, what can we expect the next time the Democrats win an election? How many more Democrat presidencies can the nation endure before it finally descends into total depravity and madness? The collapse of American society into violent chaos, anarchy and civil war is by no means a far-fetched scenario.
Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.
The reason Bill Clinton won a second term has a name: “Newt Gingrich.” For all his despicable behavior, he was/is smart enough to see which way the wind blows and affect compromise when necessary. Take away l’affaire Lewinsky and he wasn’t too bad a President.
Alas, the McGovern wing of the party could not bear his success and tossed it at the earliest opportunity. Although the Democratic Left loved having a Democrat in the Oval Office, it hated the move to the Center. Consequently, it began a “Decade of Long Knives” purging anyone who tried to put the brakes on the drift to hedonistic, secular socialism, including me, FWIW. Hillary went along with that and is now paying the price.
(Part of me wonders if Bill is secretly happy with Hillary’s distress. He’s too much a narcissist to not want to be the only Clinton ever to be President.)
Then again, when Bill Clinton finally admitted that he got his spokes greased in the Oval Office his approval ratings actually went up. And this country was no where near as sick and backwards 20 years ago as it is today.
I am not a Trump fan. I think he’s a phony playing the dumber element of the so-called right wing in this country. But I’d rather throw rose petals in Trump’s path than see Clinton or especially Sanders in command of this country.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Obama was, in a sense, an anomaly on the national stage, given the implosion of the Democrats across the country at the local level. While its true, he is far left, we need to remember that in 2008 he ran as a blank slate allowing voters to create the Obama they wanted without really knowing his positions on anything. Combine that with White guilt which caused voters to believe electing a black President would finally allow us to move on from the legacy of slavery and GOPe fecklessness in nominating “anti-Reagans” to lead the ticket, and Presto!, you have the last eight years. Sure, Sanders gets all the hype, but that’s because the Dems got rid of any moderating influence years ago.
Under the present circumstances the best we can hope for is a choice between Bernie and Ted. That would present the country with a clear choice and and force the mushy middle to decide or get out of the way. Ted Cruz is no President Ruthless Hardass but he’s a close as we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.
Blaming Republicans for Democrat success — which is the essential burden of your argument — generally requires us to ignore the influence of the liberal media. One does not have to be a fan of Newt Gingrich to understand how, in the wake of the 1994 “Republican Revolution” that put the Speaker’s gavel in Gingrich’s hands, the liberal media became frantic to portray the GOP as “extremists” dominated by religious kooks, etc.
I arrived in D.C. in 1997 in the immediate aftermath of all that tumult, and two months later, the Lewinsky scandal broke. The facts of the Lewinsky case were obvious enough — perjury, obstruction of justice and, I would argue, the subornation of perjury in having Monica sign a false affidavit in what was a transparent quid pro quo exchange for her being hired by Revlon, where the CEO was a major Friend of Bill. The various deceptive sophistries by which the Clinton-friendly media extricated him from the consequences of his crimes was a fascinating thing to watch at close range from my position as an assistant national editor, and the failure of America to purge itself of that gross stain on our national honor represented, as Paul Weyrich sagely observed, proof of the defeat of conservatives in the Culture War.
The Left took over academia and the public schools, and tutored two generations of American youth in an anti-Christian worldview. There were, of course, pockets of resistance to this, and some young people were shrewd enough to reject the false ideology that the education establishment sought to impose. Yet the triumph of the Left in academia, especially at the elite schools, meant that the Left’s anti-American agenda was supported by nearly every journalist, novelist, artist, social social scientist and film director of any influence.
What American youth learned from TV and movies was the same thing they learned from public schools and universities, and the answer to the 50-point essay question on their final exam was always the same: VOTE DEMOCRAT.
Blaming Republican politicians for their failure to deal successfully with the consequences of these trends seems unfair, even though I have a generally low opinion of Republican politicians.
Hmmm.
I was up at 3:30 MST time having my hot chocolate while I scanned the headlines before reading the funnies. I didn’t see anything like that.
Has Drudge become region specific?
Not that I know of. Drudge is updated regularly enough that the whole top of the page sometimes changes suddenly. Probably this explains it.
A few complaints.
“Charisma” was a term invented by Max Weber to describe rare inspirational ability (e.g. Buddha or Christ). It’s really debased by applying it to pols who put together applause lines. You might apply it to pols with an exceptional talent for self-presentation (William Jennings Bryan, John Kennedy) or pols who are reference points (Ronald Reagan in his retirement and John Kennedy posthumously). Obama is not charismatic. He’s just verbally fluent.
As for his electoral successes, he performed no better in 2008 than did George Bush the Elder in 1988 (and required a financial catastrophe unfolding in real time and a codpiece media to manage that). His plurality on his re-election was unremarkable (better than the four most recent presidents voted out of office; better than George W. Bush and Woodrow Wilson; but worse than Messrs. Coolidge, Roosevelt (3x), Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton)
I suspect Andrew Klavan has a better idea of the significance of Obama and his era than is delineated in this post. His sense of matters is that Obama is a hapless putz whose manifest incompetence has generated problems that it will take better men some time to clean up. I’ll refer you also to the Catholic blogger Donald McClarey on just who Obama is: simply the resultant of the vectors you find in the Democratic Party, someone who adds little of his own but certain rancid little flourishes. He is not a figure who signifies much other than the sad degree to which national political candidates can now be vended like brand-name consumer products.
As for Sanders, he’s a different animal than either the Clintons or the Obamas. The first 17 years of his adult life were undistinguished: he had jobs, not a career. Some were hourly and some salaried (working for local philanthropies like the historical society). He shows no evidence of Mooch-style or Hillary-style cupidity. He cut his teeth in local politics, running in 1981 to limit a proposed property tax hike. His time in office actually was a hinge in Burlington politics, not because he was Trotsky on Lake Champlain, but because he disrupted the networks of influence around his predecessor, Gordon Paquette. He’s much more of an independent thinker and ideological eccentric than BO, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever manifest Obama’s talent for casual lying. I do not think many Sanders supporters are willing to acknowledge what the post-Dukakis Washington Democratic Party really is; the best you can say is that the Sanders phenomenon makes esoteric references to it in the course of slamming approved bogies.
The only person I knew face-to-face in 2008 who made any reference to Obama’s race was an education professor born in 1952 who has likely never voted for a Republican in her goofy life. Perhaps some of the baffling affection the young had for BO might be explained by his cafe-au-lait complexion. I’d be very surprised to discover that the racial angle explained more than the thinnest sliver of his support.
“The McGovern Wing”? George McGovern was honest as the day is long. The idea that he would sick the IRS on his political opponents or lie guiltlessly and brazenly as BO has done about Benghazi beggars belief. Ditto Jimmy Carter, who was and is a more abrasive human being than McGovern. The intramural culture of the elites of the Democratic Party is putrid in ways it simply was not in 1975.
The Democrats, who used to be able to claim to be the party of the working man, have become the party of the non-working man; that’s why they have lost the white working class voter.
Mitt Romney was excoriated for telling the truth, that Barack Hussein Obama had 47% of the vote wrapped up due to government payments. He needed only 4% more, which was just what he got.
The Democrats have imploded on the state and local level outside of the large cities, but there are now enough votes in the cities to carry whole states, which matters in presidential and Senate elections. Once you are talking about House races, or state legislative districts, many of which are suburban or rural, Republicans are pretty much a lock outside of the northeast.
There were something like 57 precincts in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia in which Mitt Romney got zero votes in 2012, zip, zilch, nada, not a single one. Even a vote fraudster would have left a few Romney votes, to avoid calling attention to the fraud.
My point was not to “blame” Gingrich for Clinton. Rather, Gingrich in the house tempered Clinton’s more liberal influences. Gingrich–and to a lesser extent Senate Democrats like Sam Nunn and Pat Moynihan–kept things toward the center and didn’t deliberately alienate moderate and conservative Democrats. Once Clinton left office, Gore moved to the left. Clinton fatigue brought us Bush The Younger and that enabled the complete purge of moderates within the Democratic Party.
(I used to live in a rural “blue” county. Voted Democratic, loves guns, hates abortion. All the local Demo pols were that way. It went with Obama in 2008, but shifted locally to Republicans and voted Romney in 2012. There was just no place for the people in my county in the Democratic party.)
I used that term for the far Left of the Democratic party. I remember 1972 quite well. I don’t/didn’t dislike George McGovern. However, he did obtain most of his support from the far Left, hate Nixon at all costs, segment of the population.
Recall, 1968 saw the far Left destroyed in Chicago. Recall the Democratic Establishment elevated Humphrey over McCarthy. Recall, George Wallace’s defection from the Dems for a third party race. The far Left coalesced around McGovern and has been moving to control the Dems ever since. You’re right that McGovern himself would probably be horrified, but them’s the facts.
I don’t dispute the coastal-urban v. “flyover”-rural divide. It’s existence explains the constant Democrat drumbeat to get rid of the Electoral College, one of the lesser acknowledged “Checks and Balances” the Founding White Male Dudes put into the Constitution.
My assertion is not exactly novel. Others have hypothesized it as early as post-election 2008. Given the current climate, it would be surprising for people to a) act on a belief that “voting for Obama proves I’m not racist” and b) refuse to acknowledge that motivation.
Nonetheless, there’s no question that post 2008, the belief was that by electing a black President, we’d somehow gotten over the racial subtext in American History. Hell, no less a luminary than Michelle Obama proclaimed that for the first time, she was proud of her country. Query why she said that then?
As overheard during the week after the 2008 election “He was young and looked cool, so I voted for him”
Once Obama’s Iranian nuke deal reaches fruition, those 57 precincts 100 percent Obama will be moot.
Whether it be Iranian or North Korean nukes launched at us, most of the dead will be Democrats in the cities.
We should leave Chicago un rebuilt in its post Hiroshima and Nagasaki state as testimony to Obama’s folly.
Dana, look at this:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/121199/obama-weekly-job-approval-demographic-groups.aspx
Where is Obama’s approval rating the lowest? Among people eligible for Social Security and Medicare. It’s not that this sort of thing does not influence people (it does), but the notion that there is a simple and linear relationship there is simply not true. You can view the young as beneficiaries of the student loan programs. The thing is, so are their parents. There grandparents might also have an interest at stake there.
Now look at the figure for racial categories. Blacks are more likely to draw some sort of benefit at a given point in time and over the life cycle (most commonly SNAP cards in this day and age), but blacks remain predominantly a wage-earning population with employment-to-population ratios lower than national means but only about 11% lower. The benefits configuration cannot explain more than a fraction of the 11-to-1 ratio you see there in favor of BO.
Also, seeing the political preferences of professional people as derived from public subsidies to their employers misconstrues, I think, the sources of those preferences. Clergymen get no subsidies, but the clergy is exclusively liberal outside the evangelical and traditionalist Catholic ambo. (And there’s a large contingent of liberal Vichy evangelicals nowadays; traditionalist Catholics often have weird alt-right affinities).
I haven’t noticed a ‘constant liberal drumbeat’ to get rid of the electoral college, or much but episodic complaints. There’s an outfit called ‘National Popular Vote; that used to spam some sites, like “No Left Turns’. Haven’t heard from them in a while.
The one thing electoral voting does is to provide tabulation conventions which allow elections administration to remain decentralized. Simply retaining electoral votes as a tabulation convention would accomplish that. There is no need for the ritual of a dozen party wheelhorses meeting in the state capitol every four years the 3d week of December.
Some of the young can be stupefying in their frivolity. It will pass for many of them.
Please. Google is your friend. Hillary has criticized it on numerous occasions. The reason they wish to get rid of it and go with a pure popular vote is obvious. The coasts would call the shots.
It would have very little effect on the balance between the coasts and the interior. What it might do would be to inaugurate an ‘arms race’ between jurisdictions and induce one after another to relax eligibility requirements regarding the suffrage. George Will remarked on that problem 40 years ago. He was concerned about the enfranchisement of callow adolescents. Nowadays, the concern would be the enfranchisement of aliens.
“Where is Obama’s approval rating the lowest? Among people eligible for Social Security and Medicare.”
Two words:
1. Demographics
and
2. Memory.
DEMOGRAPHICS
A 70-year-old is most likely a white Christian who was born in the United States. The Democrat Party is now manifestly anti-white and anti-Christian and in favor of an open-borders amnesty policy for illegal immigrants. Do we suppose that old people can’t see this?
MEMORY
The 70-year-old was born in 1946 and grew up in Eisenhower’s America. His or her father likely fought in WWII. The 70-year-old has a childhood memory of an America that actually worked, and also remembers watching that America be destroyed by the radical Left of the 1960s. The 70-year-old remembers the gloom of the Jimmy Carter presidency, and the idiotic liberals who advocated detente with the Soviets. And the 70-year-old remembers, most of all, how Ronald Reagan — a dangerous right-winger, according to the liberal media — fixed so much of what had gone wrong with America during the 1960s and ’70s.
The fact that the elderly qualify for Social Security and Medicare has nothing at all to do with their low opinion of Barack Obama, nor is “racism” the explanation. Old people don’t hate Obama because he is black, but because the Democrat Party is anti-white — and anti-Christian, and anti-capitalist and, of course, ultimately anti-American. The real hate that endangers America belongs entirely to the Democrats, and it would be nice if there were Republicans who had the intelligence and courage to speak the truth about all this.
The Vichy Evangelicals call themselves evangelical, but it’s simply a label they’ve usurped. I have known a good many leftist clergy, even some that now call themselves evangelical, but I have as yet to meet one that was legitimately evangelical.
McGovern hasn’t been gone that long. I don’t remember seeing anything from him decrying the direction of the party. One problem for him would be the fact that the direction of the party is the one he set for it.
Probably. It just struck me as weird.
Even after Nude Hamster Clinton has far more delegates than Bernie. The DNC will drag her moldering corpse across the finish line whatever it takes. And anyone hoping for an indictment is standing downwind of too many Sanders supporters.
Why do you think the rumblings about further punishing Petraeus were so decisively quashed? Now Hillary is entirely innoculated against her felonies.
Just wondering … Does the Trump campaign bear any resemblence to what you envisioned in your “Right Wing Populism” article from a couple of years ago?
Superdelegates amount to about 15% of the total. There have been six competitive Democratic nomination contests held after the superdelegates were incorporated and in none of them was the winner’s advantage among superdelegates a decisive factor. The question now is whether the erosion Hillary is suffering will be rapid enough to cost her the Southern primaries. You see erosion that rapid re particular states from time to time. Not sure about re large blocs of states.
“Democrats are the party of…atheists.”
Not all of us. Not by a long shot.
[…] Democrat Armageddon […]
It was LIBERTARIAN POPULISM — a term I thought I had invented in reference to Bob Barr’s 2008 campaign, but which no one ever credits to me — and, to some degree, yes, one can see elements of this in the Trump campaign, just as it could be seen in the popularity of Sarah Palin,and in the Tea Party movement. What I had in mind back then was something quite like what Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign demonstrated, that there was a natural constituency for a pro-free-market movement that didn’t have that uptight defensive attitude — a fetishistic obsession with being seen as “respectable” by the liberal media — that had crippled the GOP for so long.
Smitty, I notice, seems to be anti-Trump and pro-Cruz, a stance I consider a mistake. The GOP cannot win an election without the support of the kind of voters who now support Trump, and so I have sought to avoid offending those voters. The key thing in the 2016 GOP primaries is to STOP JEB. I keep warning about the Phantom Menace of a Bush revival, and yet there is a certain slice of the conservative movement that considers Trump a greater danger than Bush. Honestly, until the Republicans can rid themselves of the taint of Bushism, they deserve to lose. I do not particularly like Trump, but at least he is not a Bush, and that’s enough for me.
I disagree. Trump is more dangerous than Bush, because Trump is the one candidate the GOP could run that would lose in November. Not only that, even if Trump did manage to win, he would be a loose cannon that would guarantee a Democrat in the White House in 2020 and probably a Democratic Congress in 2018 or 2020, and look at what happened the last time we had a Democratic President and Congress.
Trump is more dangerous than Bush, because Trump is the one candidate the GOP could run that would lose in November
No. Pretty much a dead heat re all eight hypothetical contests, and it hardly matters whether the Democratic candidate is Sanders or Clinton. Trump loses a small amount the other three or four leading candidates do not.
Have you seen Trump’s unfavorability ratings? Do you think they would go anywhere but worse if he were to get the GOP nomination?
A friend of mine who doesn’t talk about politics and who I never thought would be a GOP voter posted yesterday that he asked for a GOP primary ballot (he’s currently traveling overseas and won’t be back before the election in his state) solely so he can vote against Donald Trump.
I don’t believe Hillary is an ideologue. Thoroughly corrupt and self-serving, but not an ideologue like Obama. I don’t believe she’d try to undo any of Obama’s works, but I don’t think she’d follow in his footsteps either. Although her campaign is taking on an air of desperation because she knows that becoming President is the only way she can stay out of jail.
[…] The Left took over academia and the public schools, and tutored two generations of American youth in… […]
Bush and Bushism indeed must go. It’s not merely the harm the first two have done and this one would do, but the harm that went on under their very noses. Their greatest sin however, is and would be making no attempt to undo the harm done before them. While I’d never vote for Bernie or the Witch I consider Jeb Bush a much bigger threat to this Republic than Bernie Sanders.
A democratic congress is unlikely for the foreseeable future.
2008
Ran as a blank slate allowing voters to create the Obama they wanted without really knowing his positions on anything….sounds just like a guy whose name rhymes with Ronald Dump
I agree, I think the old gal winning would be the end of hope for me…but Trump scares the hell out of me
anecdotally, I know a number of people who wouldn’t vote for Trump under any circumstances
most
She’s an amoral power mad harridan with probable brain damage, a seriously flawed woman with no visible attributes for the job
Thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure why my recollection was “RW Populism”, perhaps it was because I saw it as a phenomenom originating with Social Conservatives, expecially Southerners, who for decades were accustomed to silk-stocking trial lawyers donning a hard hat every 4 years, while talking about being the friend of the working man, yada yada yada. And, we yellow dogs voted accordingly until Reagan woke us up from our slumber.
I find myself agreeing with Smitty with being pro-Cruz, but not necessarily anti-Trump. Frankly, we’ve had the most outstanding field of candidates this time around that I can ever remember. Any of them would make a pretty good President, but I agree with you that JEB would be last on the list. At this point, the only thing that can stop Trump is Trump himself. But, if he continues to Tweet out trash like this one, he may find his poll numbers dwindling faster than castor oil through a widow woman…
Remember, it was the Republican Party, with the help of Conservatives,
that made so many promises to their base, BUT DIDN’T KEEP THEM! Hi DT
Grandma Mao can’t bring herself to repudiate due-date abortion, even though it’s immensely unpopular. She worships Moloch instead of Marx, but she is no less an ideologue than the Bernshevik.
Don’t forget that in 2008 exit polling, 52 percent of those that voted for Barack Obama also thought that the GOP still controlled Congress.
Maybe not the House, but definitely the Senate. Don’t forget that a Democratic Senate with a Democratic President would let them pack the Supreme Court with the types that make Bernie Sanders look conservative.